ly see the wound, but I'm
just going to see it. I know it's going to be more horrible than any
wound I've ever seen. And then I wake.... That's why I don't look at
them more than I can help."

"You're looking at them now," she said.

"Oh, them. That's nothing. Cotton wool."

And she, putting her hand on his arm to draw him up the stairs, away.
John shaking her hands off and his queer voice rising. "I wish you
wouldn't do that, Charlotte. You know I hate it."

He had never said anything to her like that before. It hadn't struck her
before that, changed to himself, he would change to her. He hadn't got
over last night. She had hurt him; her knowledge of his cowardice hurt
him; and this was how he showed his pain.

She thought: Here's Antwerp falling and Belgium beaten. And all those
wounded. And the dead.... And here am I, bothering about these little
things, as if they mattered. Three little things.

* * * * *

The fire from the battlefield had raked the village street as they came
in; but it had ceased now. The cure had been through it all, going up and
down, helping with the stretchers. John was down there in the wine-shop,
where the soldiers were, looking for more wounded.

They had found five in the stable yard, waiting to be taken away; they
had moved four of them into the ambulance. The fifth, shot through the
back of his head, still lay on the ground on a stretcher that dripped
blood. Charlotte stood beside him.

The cure came to her there. He was slender and lean in his black cassock.
He had a Red Cross brassard on his sleeve, and in one hand he carried his
missal and in the other the Host and the holy oils in a little bag of
purple silk. He looked down at the stretcher and he looked at Charlotte,
smiling faintly.

"Where is Monsieur?" he said.

"In the wine-shop, looking for wounded."

She thought: He isn't looking, for them. He's skulking there, out of the
firing. He'll always be like that.

It had begun again. The bullets whistled in the air and rapped on the
stone causeway, and ceased. The cure glanced down the street towards the
place they had come from and smiled again.

She liked his lean dark face and the long lines that came in it when it
smiled. It despised the firing, it despised death, it despised everything
that could be done to him there. And it was utterly compassionate.

"Then," he said, "it is for you and me to carry him, Mademoiselle." He
stooped